How ING Direct Canada prevented a social media ‘issue’ from becoming a full-blown PR crisis

How ING Canada prevented a social media 'issue' from becoming a crisis

We made a decision very quickly that we thought that our brand is so valuable to us; we spent years building it up and gaining trust, and one marketing campaign to sell TFSAs and RSPs isn’t worth damaging that

In early January 2013, ING Direct Canada put into market a new TV commercial to promote its RSP and TFSA products in advance of RSP season. The commercial depicted a clearly stressed out man who viewers soon discover was helped by his wife taking him to ING. It didn’t take long for consumers — who interpreted the ad as making light of symptoms often associated with mental illness — to voice their indignation through social media channels, including direct communication with ING Canada CEO Peter Aceto. The backlash forced the bank to decide whether to do away with the ads during a critical promotional period or sacrifice some of the brand equity it had earned among consumers by keeping the ads on air. ING ultimately chose to take down the ads. Mr. Aceto recently spoke with the Financial Post’s Dan Ovsey about how the bank handled the matter and the rationale behind the its decision. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Q: How did you identify that this was becoming something you needed to address directly with consumers?A: Social media was the first place where we were beginning to get signs that people were interpreting some of our marketing in a way we had never intended. It was through our corporate Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as to my personal Twitter account.

Q: What was it they were saying to you through your personal Twitter handle?A: Within a couple of days of the TV ads going on, I started to get a few interactions from people that they felt that we were being insensitive to the really important issue of mental illness, and that part of the biggest problem related to mental illness is the stigma around it. That’s why people keep it private. Of course, our ads had nothing to do with mental illness, and it was something that surprised us, but certainly I got some very gentle tweets that this was insensitive, and that this was a matter we should be conscious about and that some people felt our ads were offensive.

Over time we felt we could sense a momentum on social media and e-mail and other things that started to give us a feeling that it wasn’t one or two people, that there might be a greater critical mass eventually

Q: Did you directly respond to the people that tweeted at you, or did you put together a “war room” first to figure out how you would respond?A: Those were early days, and I’m the guy behind my Twitter account, so of course I responded to it. Whenever people speak to me, I respond to them. I said something very genuine, which was that this was absolutely not our intention to offend anybody and that I apologize if we had done so. However, over time we felt we could sense a momentum on social media and e-mail and other things that started to give us a feeling that it wasn’t one or two people, that there might be a greater critical mass eventually.

Q: What were the signs of momentum?A: Twitter’s one thing. You can quickly get a message across or respond to messages. Facebook is a place where you could get bigger dialogue, and that’s where people were explaining themselves a bit more and explaining why they felt the way they felt and how they felt. Sometimes in social media circles, people can be more aggressive about their feelings than they would be in person, so we got a real flavour that it wasn’t just a preference issue; it was becoming an emotional issue. One thing that really drove it home for me was that I received an e-mail from a gentlemen and there was a link attached, and the link was a story about a man who had received news that his son, who had gone away to university, had committed suicide. He had no idea. His son had kept it to himself. Now this guy is on a campaign around the issue, and I personally found the video to be very real and very touching and upsetting to me. That night, I went home and watched our ads again in that context and saw them in a different way. That’s when we had a full team meeting first in the morning to discuss the ads and the feedback we had received and how we felt about it.

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Q: Did you make any promises to consumers at that point about what actions you would take?A: That’s when I weighed in on behalf of the organization and said that we weren’t aware of this issue and it certainly wasn’t part of our plan, but we’re hearing it’s being taken a different way, and you have our commitment that we’re going to take a few moments to consider what we should do and get back to you.

Q: So, you didn’t make any promises?A: I made a promise that in light of the new information we would reconsider and get back to people. Then we got back together as a group with a variety of people — even people who weren’t directly related but could offer an objective viewpoint. In our view, if you tell people you’re going to get back to them, you have to get back to them before they expect you to do so; otherwise they’ll think you’re just stalling. We made a decision very quickly that we thought that our brand is so valuable to us; we spent years building it up and gaining trust, and one marketing campaign to sell TFSAs and RSPs isn’t worth damaging that. And I think we made an extremely good decision to pull those TV ads. There was the option of modifying them, but in the end we decided to just pull them (off the air) altogether, and we communicated that instantly.

The short-term gain of what you might get or not get this month or next month is not worth all the equity you’ve built up and the trust

Q: How did you compensate for the marketing gap? What did you do to fill the air time you had already purchased?A: Overall, those ads were relatively inexpensive, but we still spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, we did have other commercials we had used previously, and we had slightly repurposed them so that we could use the media space we had bought, so we could keep the message out there. They weren’t intended as a contingency because we hadn’t anticipated this, but they were still very good.

Q: Do you think you re-earned consumers’ faith in the brand by taking down the ad?A: Having a brand is an investment. Trust is something that is also an investment. So, the short-term gain of what you might get or not get this month or next month is not worth all the equity you’ve built up and the trust. We never saw this as an opportunity to win or strengthen our brand, but certainly the feedback we got afterward was that they didn’t think our competitors would behave in the same way and that we truly did listen and that we changed our behaviour, and they acknowledged that we made some short-term commercial sacrifice. At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to get much credit for it, and I don’t think we want it, and I do think our RSP and TFSA campaigns are going well. I think they could have gone better without the interruption in the campaign and the lack of consistency (because it was a very integrated campaign), but all in all it was the right thing to do.

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